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MEMORIAL SERVICE McAuliffe's mother urges exploration NASA, she adds, must continue By Jonathan Saltzman, Globe Staff, 2/6/2003
Speaking after an interfaith service at Framingham State College honoring Columbia's seven lost explorers, Grace Corrigan said the conquest of space carries inevitable risks. But to abandon manned flight, as some critics of NASA have suggested, would insult the memory of the 17 astronauts who have died since 1967 in the Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia missions. ''There's a risk in it, and there will always be a risk in it,'' Corrigan said after the service in the college's modest, 19th-century stone chapel. ''But there's no reason to shut the program down. It's done too much for humanity. If we didn't continue, they [the astronauts] would have died in vain.'' Corrigan, who lives in Framingham, said the Columbia disaster evoked searing memories of Jan. 28, 1986, when the Challenger blew up 73 seconds after liftoff. Corrigan was among those gazing skyward at Cape Canaveral in Florida when the shuttle exploded, killing the seven-member crew, including McAuliffe, a 37-year-old high school teacher from Concord, N.H. A 1970 graduate of Framingham State, McAuliffe was the first ordinary citizen in space.
''Naturally it brought back memories of what we went through -- it's an awful thing,'' said Corrigan, whose voice had broken with emotion when she addressed about 125 students, faculty, and administrators in the chapel. ''We had no worries when Christa went up -- none. We thought the program was infallible. But there are always risks, and we should have realized that.'' Corrigan, a frequent visitor to the Christa McAuliffe space education center established at the college in 1994, expressed confidence that NASA would figure out what caused the Columbia disaster and remedy the problem. But she said she hopes NASA never sends another schoolteacher into space. The death of McAuliffe, who was chosen from 11,000 applicants, was a severe blow to children around the country, she said, and it would be devastating if another teacher died. Other speakers at yesterday's ceremony -- which was held just eight days after the college's annual memorial service for the Challenger crew -- invoked passages from the Bible and the Koran to praise the courage of Columbia's astronauts. The Rev. William Kremmell, the college's Catholic chaplain, recited a passage from the Book of Joel that reads, ''Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.'' He said, ''The Columbia astronauts proclaimed their dreams, not so much in words but in their noble deeds.'' Since the Columbia disaster, the McAuliffe space education center has received hundreds of condolence calls and e-mails, according to Raymond J. Griffin Jr., who heads the program. The center each year draws 13,000 middle-school students who simulate the work of astronauts and mission controllers. The center, which features mock-ups of the NASA mission control room in Houston and the interior of the International Space Station, has also revised its program. Now the two-hour student field trips begin with a discussion of the Columbia mission and a picture of the crew projected on the wall of the ''briefing room.'' After completing the program yesterday, Patrick Jolicoeur, a sixth-grader from the Dr. William Arnone School in Brockton, said he enjoyed simulating the work of a space explorer. But he added that it was troubling to watch the Columbia disaster on television. ''It was kind of scary looking,'' he said, '' 'cause you saw pieces flying to the ground and burning.''
This story ran on page A22 of the Boston Globe on 2/6/2003.
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© Copyright 2003 New York Times Company |
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he mother of Christa McAuliffe said yesterday that manned space exploration must continue despite the disaster in the space shuttle program, and predicted that NASA would fix whatever caused the Columbia to break up.
